The Village in the Sky is an unfinished floor high inside a World Trade Centre tower, where residents of the Cuffe Parade Slum gather for a communal feast. Lin gives the place its name when Karla asks where they are going: the “village” is not on the ground but twenty-three floors above it, amid exposed concrete, construction materials, animals, bedding, and the people who have made a temporary home there. Its defining contrast is both literal and social: a lived-in community occupies the unfinished shell of a modern skyscraper, while the slum below remains vulnerable to deprivation and removal.

Setting and contrast

The Village in the Sky belongs to a landscape divided by proximity. The slum stands beside the World Trade Centre, whose air-conditioned shops display jewels, silks, carpets, and craftworks. Across the road from those neon lights and floodlit fountains lies a ten-acre settlement of seven thousand small huts, housing twenty-five thousand of Bombay’s poorest people. There is no electricity, running water, or sanitation, and residents cannot be certain that the authorities will not sweep the settlement away. The nearby towers promise modernity and commercial prosperity; the people who help build them live in conditions marked by uncertainty.

The slum’s entrance makes that inequality bodily. An open latrine, screened by reed mats and hidden among tall weeds, gives off a smell so overpowering that Lin struggles not to vomit. Prabaker’s usually beaming expression hardens as he directs Lin’s attention to how people live. The Village in the Sky later offers a very different first impression of the same community: not a spectacle of deprivation, but a place of hospitality, shared food, and everyday arrangements. The contrast does not erase hardship; it gives the residents a space in which their collective life is visible on its own terms.

A settlement formed by construction

The community grew from the work of building the towers. Construction companies were required to provide nearby land and huts for workers, many of whom had travelled from other states and had no secure home in Bombay. Some accepted dangerous, hard labour partly to obtain a shelter through their jobs. Employers also benefited from keeping workers close to the site: travel time disappeared, family members could be hired when needed, and a population living together could be more easily influenced and controlled.

The first plots were laid out in an area divided into more than three hundred hut-sized lots. Workers received a plot and money for bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber, then built their homes with help from family and friends. Wells supplied water, paths were cleared, and a high barbed-wire fence marked the perimeter of the legally provided settlement. The huts spread like a shallow root system beneath the towers they helped bring into being.

Beyond that boundary, shops and homes accumulated in response to daily needs. Chai sellers and grocers settled near the fence, followed by vegetable shops, tailors, restaurants, gambling dens, and places selling alcohol or charras. Homeless people arrived in growing numbers, and new gaps in the wire allowed residents to cross in both directions: squatters came into the workers’ compound for water, while workers crossed out to shop or visit friends. The outer settlement expanded without the more orderly lanes of the original workers’ area. In time, there were eight squatters for every person in the workers’ compound, and the legal distinction between the two became difficult to see amid the crowding.

The unfinished tower

Prabaker proudly identifies the twin towers as the tallest buildings in India, while Lin corrects him: they are the tallest in Bombay. The distinction matters less to the view from the ground than the scale of the structures themselves. At the time of the visit, their concrete reached roughly three-quarters of their planned height; windows, doors, and fittings had not yet been installed. Rows of empty openings exposed the construction inside, with workers moving from floor to floor. Generators, hammers, drills, and grinders filled the site with a continuous mechanical clatter.

Women carrying dishes of gravel on their heads moved between piles of stone and cement mixers, while others worked beside men on the upper levels. They carried much of the stone, steel, and cement one load at a time, including on floors thirty-five storeys above the ground. Prabaker speaks of the towers with proprietorial pride despite having no part in their construction and living in the illegal settlement. His pride shows how the buildings have become bound up with the community’s identity, even as the workers and squatters occupy a precarious position beside them.

Life on the twenty-third floor

The group reaches the twenty-third floor by elevator. There, a broad, unfinished concrete space is divided by columns and threaded with cables. The absence of colour and finished walls makes the human presence stand out: one area beside a pillar is fenced with wicker and bamboo as an animal pen, where goats, chickens, cats, and dogs forage among scraps. Blankets and mattresses are piled near another pillar, and a third area has been set aside for children, with toys, games, and small mats. What might appear to be an empty construction floor has been adapted to accommodate the practical needs of people and animals.

A feast is being laid out on clean reed mats. Banana leaves serve as plates; women distribute saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other dishes, while kerosene stoves cook more food nearby. After washing their hands at a drum of water, Lin and the others sit on the floor. The women have their own banquet a short distance away, and Karla is the only woman in the group of twenty men. She appreciates both the food and the unusual place where it is served. The meal gives the unfinished floor a temporary social order: it is divided into areas for animals, sleeping, children, and eating, and its use depends on shared provision rather than architectural completion.

Social life and significance

The feast takes place within a settlement whose residents understand themselves as one community despite the company fence and official distinctions between legal workers and squatters. Their friendships, marriages, celebrations, and daily needs cross the boundary; fires, floods, and epidemics require cooperation regardless of which side is affected. The Village in the Sky concentrates that shared life in an unexpected setting. Its residents occupy a structure meant to rise above the city, but they do so collectively and provisionally, bringing bedding, animals, children’s play, and a banquet into its bare concrete interior.

The slum’s less elevated infrastructure also remains part of this setting. At night, the track along its eastern edge runs between a large open latrine area and the construction site’s stored materials. A narrow, irregular route is commonly left clear through the filth so latecomers can reach the settlement without stepping into it; Lin knows its potholes and turns from repeated late walks. Set against the Village in the Sky’s high, open floor, that ground-level path makes the community’s ingenuity and material constraints inseparable. The name captures an upward view of the slum, but the place’s significance lies in what its residents carry with them: a functioning social world made amid unfinished structures and uncertain ground.